From a security standpoint, running with your user privileges as low as possible is always best. On the other hand, running as an Administrator is especially bad. But even if you supervise a network and need to do much of your work logged in as an administrator, you still shouldn't run certain dangerous applications—most prominently Internet Explorer—as Administrator.

Dropmyrights.exe is a command-line utility that takes the program you want run as its first argument. The second argument is 'N', 'C', or 'U'. These correspond to Normal user (the default), Constrained user, and Untrusted user. For example:

DropMyRights.exe "c:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe" c

runs Internet Explorer as a constrained user. For convenience, you can create a Windows shortcut that executes the command line and give the shortcut a descriptive name like "Internet Explorer (Constrained)". You'll find details about what these user levels mean in the Microsoft article.

In the coming weeks, I will be exploring other ways to accomplish this same basic goal—limiting the damage of excessive privileges under Windows by utilizing application-specific privilege-limiting. Several products implement this.

When you run a program like Internet Explorer at a severely restricted privilege level, be prepared for some things to go wrong. On my system, for example, when I ran IE as a "constrained" user the Netcraft toolbar failed. There are other downsides: For example, the browser may not have access to the Favorites list, as was also the case with my system.

The advantages of running a constrained IE, though, especially on sites you don't necessarily trust, should be obvious. Microsoft really needs to make this capability easier to access and make the function clearer to users.